Johnny Deppth

With or without elaborate makeup, Depp was determined "to invent the character from the ground up, obviously using the basis of Washington Irving's character, and trying to make him interesting and different, and push him as far as you can go. Where you're just on the verge of 'believable' and 'not-so-believable,' and quite possibly almost bad acting."

This "fun" approach is rooted in Depp's love for the extravagant thespian displays of the Universal horror classics with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and the Hammer studio's British remakes with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. (Director Tod Browning, who made "Freaks" and Lugosi's "Dracula" as well as several of Lon Chaney's silent milestones, is one of Depp's favorite filmmakers. Depp refers to Chaney himself, "The Man of a Thousand Faces," as "one of my heroes.")

Yet Depp's primal approach to character goes beneath and beyond follow-the-dot connections. "When I read a script and it's something that grabs hold of me immediately, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images. For 'Scissorhands,' for instance, I kept thinking of dogs I had as a child, you know, and newborn babies. With 'Sleepy Hollow' it was the sort of drive that Basil Rathbone had as Sherlock Holmes -- to take that and use that, but what's going on behind that is total and utter confusion. Whereas Basil Rathbone knew exactly what he was talking about -- he hit every note -- Ichabod would hit it but would, in fact, miss it."

Depp says he added the "ethereal quality" of his late friend Roddy McDowall and the "energy and righteousness" of, yes, Angela Lansbury. Depp remembers registering Lansbury as "this force" in "Death on the Nile," but I suspect he means another Agatha Christie mystery, "The Mirror Crack'd," in which Lansbury played the sleuth Miss Marple (the inspiration for Lansbury's heroine in the TV series "Murder, She Wrote" --"energetic and righteous" indeed, not riotously depraved like Lansbury's washed-up writer in "Nile"). "So these were the ingredients," says Depp. "You just mash them all together and see what you come up with."

Depp acknowledges that the Ichabod Crane of "Sleepy Hollow" is "keenly in touch with his feminine side." Indeed, Depp thinks of him as "a fragile young girl." And to Depp, this point of attack was "dangerous" -- as risky as his goal in "Ed Wood" to blend Ronald Reagan, the Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz" and disc jockey Casey Kasem. "In the first few weeks," he says, "you're actually positive you're going to be fired." But in "Sleepy Hollow," Depp brings to his bizarre concoction an authority and humor that command respect. He knows that "even if you're playing a heightened character and living inside a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters."

Burton once said, "There's a sadness about Johnny I just respond to -- and I find it kind of funny." Accordingly, in "Sleepy Hollow," Burton hands Depp's Crane an astonishing childhood trauma that returns to the grown man in a dream. It suffuses Crane's attitudes toward logic, magic, love and virtue with a melancholy that's palpable yet also funnily fantastical.

"You do something a little bit different -- and what's the risk?" asks Depp. "You fall flat on your face or make an ass of yourself or you get fired." He'll take those risks to toil on a subject "that hasn't been beaten to death" or that may only reach the screen "just this one time."

From the moment Depp met Burton (in 1989) to convince the director to cast him in "Edward Scissorhands," Depp felt they had a mutual "appreciation for life, human behavior -- what is considered normal and what is not considered normal." They also shared "a connection in a deeper sense of having felt pretty 'outside' growing up, freakish, you know, weird." Like Burton, Depp "had been obsessed, at a very young age, with horror movies and monster movies -- I found great sanctuary in those dark places, like 'Dracula.'"

In the introduction to "Burton on Burton" (Faber & Faber, 1995), Depp wrote about how uncomfortable he was, as the star of the teen-oriented Fox television series "21 Jump Street," to talk to Burton about "Edward Scissorhands": "I was TV boy. No director in his right mind would hire me to play this character."

But no one has mistaken Burton's right mind for anyone else's. Depp can't help recapitulating for his interviewers how this pair of misfits drank three or four pots of coffee each at their initial meeting, with the actor gnawing on his coffee spoon and finding it still in his hand when he went back to his hotel. The resulting partnership has endured through a trio of movies. "If Tim wanted to remake 'The Lonely Lady,'" quips Depp, "I would play the Lonely Lady with pleasure." On "Sleepy Hollow" they've achieved their most voluptuous, least sentimental work.

Next Page: Depp on Depp: "He's overrated"

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